


we're anything brighter than even the sun

by andibeth82



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie) Compliant, F/M, Laura Barton deserves all the love, Origin Story, POV Laura Barton
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-22
Updated: 2015-12-22
Packaged: 2018-05-08 10:27:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5493887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andibeth82/pseuds/andibeth82
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Laura Barton grows up in the rural Midwest, in a quiet house with a mom who teaches history and a father who works in a hardware store, and the walls are filled with photographs and homemade ornaments and finger paintings. Sometimes, her dad plays the accordion late at night while Laura shrieks with happiness and her mother shakes her head, folding dough into lumpy piles of eventual bread. It’s not an extraordinary life, but Laura Barton doesn’t need to be extraordinary. </p><p>And then she meets a boy at the circus.</p><p>[An origin story from then to now, with stops along the way.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	we're anything brighter than even the sun

**Author's Note:**

> Guys. I really fucking love Laura Barton. This was a long time coming.
> 
> Thanks to **intrikate88** for fixing the small things and for always being my reader, and to **[geniusorinsanity](http://geniusorinsanity.tumblr.com)** for constant love, encouragement and flail. Huge thanks to the talented **nathanielbarton** for [this gifset](http://isjustprogress.tumblr.com/post/136198326270/nathanielbarton-were-anything-brighter-than).

Laura Barton grows up in the rural Midwest, in a quiet house with a mom who teaches history and a father who works in a hardware store, and the walls are filled with photographs and homemade ornaments and finger paintings. Sometimes, her dad plays the accordion late at night while Laura shrieks with happiness and her mother shakes her head, folding dough into lumpy piles of eventual bread.

It’s not an extraordinary life, but Laura Barton doesn’t need to be extraordinary.

She excels at everything in school except math, which is okay, because she hates math and doesn’t plan to make a career out of it. (She doesn’t know _what_ she intends to make a career out of, actually, but figures that’s what college is for.) She takes up an interest in art, everything from pottery to drawing to jewelry making, and brings home necklaces and paintings and slightly cracked mugs that her parents display as if they’re award worthy. (Laura thinks they’re barely award worthy.) The mugs have yellow and blue stars on the side, because Laura loves looking at the stars. She tiptoes out of the house against her parents’ wishes once a month to walk a few miles down to her neighbor’s farm, where she climbs onto the roof of their barn and explores the bright, Midwest sky.

“Sorry,” says the brunette that she happens upon one breezy night in June. “Hi. I, uh. I didn’t think anyone else came up here.”

“They don’t,” Laura says, smiling because she’s nice but also, the girl is in her usual spot and she’s kind of annoyed. The brunette seems to get the hint, shifting so that she’s no longer splayed out across the entire space, allowing Laura room to lie down.

“How long have you been coming up here?” Laura asks curiously, because she doesn’t remember seeing the girl before now.

“Not long. I just moved out here, to do a science fellowship. I’m staying down the road with a family that agreed to house me for the summer, and I saw this place when I drove by…it looked promising enough for my research.” She grins, propping herself up on an elbow and holding out a hand. “Jane Foster.”

“Laura.” _Don’t give out your last name_ , her mother always says, and Laura thinks she might trust this girl but she also knows enough not to disobey that order.

“I assume you live around here?” Jane settles back into her spot and Laura finds herself smiling, lulled by Jane’s easy and open demeanor.

“Down the road,” she admits, drawing invisible circles on the roof with her fingers. “So if you’re just here for the summer, where are you from, originally?”

“Palo Alto,” Jane says automatically. “My dad works at CalTech and I’m taking classes there, studying astronomy. Hoping after this fellowship to get into Culver University.”

“Culver?” Laura looks over in surprise. She’s heard the institution mentioned by her science teachers, mostly in lofty terms; the university was devoted to specific and extensive research and had been linked to many high profile scientists throughout the years, most of whom Laura found interesting but not interesting enough to want to know more about. “In Virginia?”

“The very one.” Jane suddenly sits up, grabbing Laura’s hand, dragging her upright also.

“Look!” Her hushed tone takes on an excited lilt. “See? The triangle, topped by Arcturus. Saturn and Mars should be right…there.” She lets her finger trail over the sky, like she’s the hand behind one of Laura’s brushes moving across a blank canvas. “When it moves, we’ll see the Spica just below the Saturn-Mars line, if we’re lucky.”

Jane breathes excitedly, her whole body trembling as if a fire has been lit inside of her, and Laura listens with rapt attention as she talks about the Summer Triangle of Deneb, about Vega and Altair, about the Milky Way. She talks with a passion that Laura’s rarely used to hearing from someone around her age, and soon it’s past midnight and Laura realizes she’s been out of the house for far too long.

“Let me know if you want to go get coffee sometime,” Jane says when Laura explains her reason for leaving just when the sky is finally getting dark enough. “I’m here all summer.”

Laura walks home thinking of the stars, and sneaks in undetected through the open window in the basement. The next night, she meets Jane for coffee. They keep in touch after Jane leaves to go home, and at some point the communication gets less frequent, but Laura’s putting all her effort into high school anyway, and doesn’t get to stargaze as much anymore.

And life goes on.

 

***

 

Laura signs up for the science fair because her teachers suggest she should, and Laura’s never backed out of anything academically without at least giving it a shot. She presents herself in her most grown-up cap-sleeved dress along with two-inch heels, straightens her hair, and brings her experiment on turning hand warmers into ice sculptures to the auditorium. The fair is sponsored by Stark Industries, as are most big events that offer things like scholarships and monetary prizes, and a tall Asian woman named Helen Cho is making the rounds, marking her notepad every so often. When she stops in front of Laura’s table she smiles, writes down a few things, asks Laura a few questions, and then moves on.

Laura doesn’t win anything at the fair, but she gets something better: a personal invitation to coffee the next morning before school starts.

“I was very impressed with your experiment, Laura,” says Helen Cho when they meet at a small coffee shop near her house. Laura smiles shyly, unsure of how to take the compliment. “It’s ingenious to think of reversing the effects of something like hand warmers. Have you thought about where you want to go to college yet?”

Laura nods. “I have a few ideas,” she admits. “I’m looking mostly at programs that offer strong liberal arts and science options, to keep my choices open.”

“Keeping your choices open. That’s smart,” Cho repeats, taking a sip of her Americano, setting manicured hands down on the table. “Have you ever thought about looking beyond the Midwest?”

“Yes,” says Laura honestly, sipping her french vanilla coffee with two sugar packets and cream. “I’m planning to apply to programs at Columbia and Georgetown.”

“Both fine institutions,” Cho says with a nod, before sliding a card across the table. “I’ll be honest, Laura -- your name came to us from Jane Foster, a brilliant student who just gained early admission to our astronomy program. I was going to send you a note about our recruitment dates to see if you’d be interested, but when I saw your name on our participant list for this fair, I thought it would be better to make the visit personally.”

Laura leaves the meeting with a head full of questions, Helen Cho’s card, and a packet of shiny higher learning material. Her parents insist that she apply, and Laura says she will, and when she gets back to her room she puts the packet on her desk, next to a framed photo of her childhood puppy and an empty mug of tea. She takes senior pictures and goes to prom and keeps taking art classes and spends all her time writing college essays to various other institutions, sealing envelopes with dozens of application checks, saying a small prayer after each one in the hopes that they’ll accept her.

And life goes on.

 

***

 

When Laura Barton turns eighteen, her parents give her a crystal heart necklace from Tiffany’s and a card with tickets to the circus that’s stopped outside of the state fair.

“We just thought it would be fun,” her mother says. “You can bring a friend, if you want.”

Laura decides not to bring a friend and instead goes by herself, because there’s a fascination that comes with seeing people who can do otherworldly things, even if it’s mostly a big game of smoke and mirrors. The circus itself is a traveling big top, the kind that Laura thinks shouldn’t exist anymore except in old stories, complete with a ringmaster and acrobats and animals. It’s composed of a large number of acts with an intermission stuck in the middle and during the break, Laura finds herself wandering around the tent haphazardly, marveling at the performers hanging out in front of their trailers and the cages full of animals. It's fairly quiet around the grounds; everyone is stuck in their own worlds and no one is really bothering to pay attention to the fact that an innocent girl is poking around where she doesn’t belong.

Well, almost no one.

“You shouldn’t be back here,” says a voice that startles her enough to jump as she passes another trailer. There’s a boy standing on the roof of it, pointing a bow and arrow at her.

“Are you going to shoot me?” Laura asks mildly and the boy scowls, dirty blonde hair flopping into his grey-blue eyes.

“I could’ve. I could’ve killed you.”

“You didn’t,” Laura points out and the boy doesn’t lower his bow but jumps from the roof and lands on the grass in a way that Laura finds mesmerizing, his limbs curling like he’s some kind of animal.

“Yeah, well. I’ve got damn good aim, so you should be _glad_ I didn’t.” He eyes her suspiciously. “Why are you out here, anyway?”

“Why not?” Laura challenges, refusing to let herself be intimidated, least of all by someone that looks half her age. The boy’s lips twitch upwards, and he extends a ruddy hand.

“I’m Clint Barton. Hawkeye. I’m the second act opener.”

“I’m Laura. I like the circus,” she responds and Clint lets out a laugh.

“Meet me back here after the show’s over, if you’re still interested,” he says, twirling an arrow between his fingers, and Laura instantly takes notice of how calloused his hands are, because they remind her of the way her father’s hands look after working all day. He trots back to his trailer and Laura returns to her seat, and when the sandy-haired agile freckled boy named Clint Barton (codename Hawkeye) falls from the tightrope like a bird without wings, Laura’s breath catches in her throat. He lands on another, lower tightrope, and he doesn’t look where he shoots his arrows but he makes every single shot, no matter how far away the target is. Sometimes, he stares straight into the audience for a long period of time before he shoots, and Laura’s heart hammers in her chest, because she pretends he might be shooting just for her.

(Years later, Laura, who has become Laura Barton, will send her husband off on another mission and she’ll make him promise to take every shot. He’ll kiss her, look her in the eye, and respond, “yes, ma’am” with such conviction that she’ll never doubt him.)

“Like what you see?” Clint asks when Laura wanders into the performer area again after the show, this time going straight for his trailer. He’s leaning on his back in the grass, tossing an apple up and down and catching it with one hand.

“I did,” Laura admits, glancing around. “How did you learn to shoot like that?”

“Practice makes perfect,” Clint says, sitting up and catching the apple he’s thrown for a final time. He bites into it and smirks. “Don’t be fooled. A lot of this place is fabricated hokey shit, but _this_ is skill.” He gets up, brushing dirt off his shirt and pants, and Laura detects the scratches and bruises along his arms, the ones that she’s quite sure she couldn’t have seen from the stage.

“You’re hurt,” she says, because her mothering instincts can’t help it, and Clint just grins in response.

“You’re pretty.”

“Stop flattering me.”

Clint shrugs, every bit the air of indifference that she would expect from a carnie. “Okay. Do you want to see the stars?”

Laura does, and she’s got free reign to be out until whenever, as long as she doesn’t get abducted somewhere between here and home. So Clint takes her hand and leads her up onto the trailer roof, which is much lower in height than the roof Laura is used to lying on when she goes to her neighbor's barn. But the view is the same, the huge expanse of sky stretching out in front of her like a blank and beautiful canvas, dotted by sparkles of gold and silver that seem too entrancing to be real.

Clint holds her hand and doesn’t say anything, but when he kisses her, it makes Laura’s heart sing in a way that she thought only existed in romance novels and movies.

She goes home and when she goes to sleep, the last thing she sees before she closes her eyes is the awkward positioning of the folder of materials for Culver University. Laura dreams and thinks of the circus, and the boy with the bow, and sawdust-tainted lips against her face, and she smiles.

And life goes on.

 

***

 

“I met someone,” Laura tells her best friend when she calls her the next morning, interrupting a study break. “At the circus.”

“ _No way_.” Claire’s voice turns excited. “A _circus_ guy?”

“Kind of,” Laura admits, thinking of the sandy-haired boy with the freckles who had kissed her under the stars. “He works there.”

“Oh man, you are living the life. You haven’t even left town and you’re living the life!” Claire bemoans. “I’m studying my ass off for medical school and will probably end up sitting around being bored to tears by surgeries if I ever get out of here. Meanwhile, you’re kissing circus boys.”

Laura laughs. “Come on, Claire. It’s New York. It’s the city that never sleeps. Maybe you’ll get lucky and find some guy who needs to be patched up and he’ll end up being your one true love.”

“Doesn’t that kind of thing only happen in movies?” Claire grumps and Laura can hear her slurping at her coffee, her pen knocking against the table.

“Technically, I could say the same thing about this, right? Besides, I wouldn't get ahead of yourself. Maybe he won’t even call.”

“You’re a catch,” Claire responds, and Laura can practically see her rolling her eyes. “He’ll totally call.”

 

***

 

The boy calls.

“Hey, it’s Clint. Barton. Hawkeye. From the, uh, circus,” he says when Laura picks up the phone. “Remember me?”

Laura blinks, swallowing down a rush of adrenaline. “Yes,” she says, trying to keep the excitement out of her voice, so as not to seem _too_ eager. “Hi.”

“Hi,” Clint repeats and there’s the sound of cars zipping along the highway in the background, where Laura suspects he’s found a payphone. “Listen, um, last time I was here, you gave me your number and said I could call you if I was ever in town again. I have a few days off from the circus and was thinking of visiting next week, if you want to do more stargazing.”

Considering how they had ended their first meeting, Laura’s not sure if Clint means stargazing or _stargazing_ , but either way, she doesn’t care. She’s also supposed to leave for college orientation in a week, but she finds she doesn’t care about _that_ , either. She meets Clint at a dive bar downtown, arriving in her beat-up Honda Accord, wearing skinny jeans and a sparkly pink top. Clint’s wearing a blue tee shirt under a flannel top, cowboy boots, and pants that look like they’ve seen better days.

He orders two Sam Adams and then two more, and tells stories about the open road while shooting quarters at the wall in the corner of the bar. Laura breathes in the smoky air of stale cigars and spilled whiskey and listens to tales about sideshow performers and ringleaders the same way she once listened to Jane Foster talk about the stars, the same way she once listened to Helen Cho talk about shining academic performances from little girls with too-big dreams. When he throws darts after five drinks with near perfect aim, she takes a little too much notice at the way his body curves with the grace of a perfect ballerina, and she thinks she’s fallen in love.

He walks her home but not all the way, because her parents still don’t know she’s sneaking out or meeting someone, so he kisses her at the edge of the road and then promises to wait until she gets inside the house, in order to make sure she’s okay.

“You’re going to be an overbearing father one day,” she teases before he leaves, and he laughs.

(Years later, Laura will listen to her husband talk while falling asleep on a lumpy couch that he’s _promised_ he’ll fix, and there will be no laughing, only swearing to hell and high water that Cooper Barton is not allowed to date until he’s at _least_ fifty.)

 

***

 

Laura goes off to college and spends late nights writing papers and early mornings drinking too much coffee. She falls in love with the English language and art history, double majoring because she can't choose which one she likes more; she becomes best friends with her roommate and they obsess over BBC America shows in their spare time. Clint continues with the circus and sends her photos and letters from the different places he travels to, and Laura makes collages in a scrapbook while he calls her after shows and sings her songs from the road. Some songs are ones that the fortune teller has taught him, and some are ones he's made up himself.

(“She wants you to sing for her,” Laura will tell Clint when he’s sitting on a rooftop in Berlin, bleeding from a stab wound in his shoulder, and one-year-old Lila will babble happily into the receiver while Clint sings her songs passed down through acrobats and dirt paths and tumbleweeds, songs about fairytales and high castles and winged unicorns.)

Laura goes to college and Clint continues with the circus until one day, he doesn’t. One day, he shows up at the front door of her dorm with a backpack and a black eye and his bow slung across his back, two arrows tipping out of the quiver.

“What happened?” Laura lets him in without any other question and Clint limps to the bed, sitting down.

“I quit,” Clint says evasively and Laura thinks there has to be more to the story but right now, she has more pressing concerns, like the mess on his face. She returns to his side with a warm washcloth, gently smearing the blood on his cheek.

“Ow, _fuck_. That hurts.”

“If you didn’t want to be patched up, you shouldn’t have come here,” Laura says, continuing to press against a deep cut. “And you didn’t just quit.”

Clint shakes his head. “I didn’t,” he says slowly, balling his fists against the covers. “I got into a fight with the ringmaster. Kind of lost my temper a little bit.”

Laura eyes him. “How did you get in a fight?”

“Stole a little bit, okay? Pickpocketed a guy’s wallet.” He pauses, sighing. “There was a kid who was homeless hanging around after the show, and he hadn’t eaten in weeks. They’d kill me if I stole real food from the tents…I was just trying to help.”

Laura stays silent, wiping down his face, because she knows –- she _knows_. It’s not the first time Clint’s told her, however offhandedly, that he’s done something for someone else just because he was trying to do good, and that something had backfired on him. Laura fingers the bruise around his eye, her thumb padding against his rough skin, a smooth river meeting coarse sand.

“Is this the end?”

“Of the circus,” Clint says, putting his hand on her arm, squeezing it gently. “But not us.”

 

***

 

Clint moves in, Laura’s roommate moves out. They take trips together, weekend getaways to wherever they can find an open space to make their own -– the mountains, a lake, a stretch of highway in the middle of nowhere. They eat greasy fried food at Red Robin and even greasier breakfasts at Waffle House and sometimes just cartons of Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream from gas station convenience stores, and Clint starts to learn about Laura, and Laura starts to learn about Clint.

He’s a messy eater, who always drops food even when he can’t help it and he leaves rings of coffee stains on the table. She prefers to not drink with her meals when it comes to alcohol, she’d rather focus on eating and then enjoy her beer or wine after the fact. He memorizes the way she laughs, the way the skin around her eyes grows taut and wrinkled, the way her whole face lights up when she smiles. She memorizes his hands, the almost captivating way his fingers grasp anything from a pen to an arrow to a fork. She finds out that when he’s too tired he drools in bed, he finds out that she’s absolutely, horribly ruthless and full of vitriol before caffeine, no matter how late in the morning they sleep.

They categorize their trips by milestones: Des Moines is where they talk about their families, Monticello is where Laura lets Clint see her cry for the first time, Wichita is where they first make love. They spend their days getting lost in America and their nights finding each other in small bedrooms and backseats of cars, mapping their discoveries with tongues and fingers and legs. The summer between junior and senior year means hopping around to various bed and breakfasts, anywhere with an open space where they can bring their coffee outside and sit without being bothered. Laura sits under the sun, her fair skin hidden by a hideously oversized floppy hat from 7-11; she studies and works on her thesis and calls Claire in New York, and explains a little apologetically why she probably won’t get to visit her anytime soon. Clint shoots with his bow, and sometimes Laura doesn’t get any studying done at all because she’s too distracted.

“I met someone,” Laura finally tells her parents, right after she graduates. “At the circus.” Her mother wants to know all the details and her father makes disapproving noises over the phone. Cell phones with cameras are just starting to make their entrance into the world, and Laura has gotten one from her parents as a gift for finishing college. She emails from the road, and sends them a few crappy pictures of Clint Barton, carnie with a heart of gold, who can shoot five arrows at once and then pause to down a cup of coffee and never miss a mark.

“He’s cute,” says her mother, always willing to look on the bright side of life. “I like his dimples.” Her father grunts out something about money and happiness, and Laura figures that’s good enough for now.

She’s supposed to be job searching but she decides she likes hanging around with Clint more. During one particular stop at a rustic cottage on the edge of Missouri’s state line, a hidden gem of a hideaway that Clint’s remembered passing from his early circus days, Clint turns around in the middle of ordering a coffee at a mom and pop cafe and arches an eyebrow.

“Do you want to learn how to shoot?”

Laura’s caught off guard, so much so that she spills most of her recently acquired latte on the floor. “ _Now_?”

“Clearly not now,” Clint says, his mouth twisting into scowl as she mops up her mess with a napkin. “Maybe when we make our next stop.”

Later, when they’re back in the car, Laura turns the question around. “Do you _want_ me to learn how to shoot?”

Clint glances at her, and shrugs. “I want you to do what you feel comfortable with,” he says, steering the car easily down the road with one hand on the wheel. “I taught myself how to throw quarters at five. Used to try to catch frogs at the lake, so I was skipping stones at seven, and at ten my brother brought home a BB gun.”

Laura sucks in a sharp breath and Clint side eyes her.

“It’s not really as bad as it seems.”

“Of course not. Who the hell has a brother that brings home a _BB gun_?”

Clint seems unfazed by her tone. “Hey, you grew up in the Midwest, too.”

Laura ignores the comment, reaching for a package of open beef jerky that they’d picked up at the last rest stop. “So, BB guns at ten.”

“Right.” Clint nods, the top of his trucker hat sliding down his face, and he pushes it up with the heel of his palm. “Learned how to shoot cans at ten, joined the circus after my parents died.”

“And did you shoot arrows at eleven?” Laura asks a little sarcastically as they pass another highway sign. Clint snorts out a laugh.

“No. I worked odd jobs cleaning up muck and washing clothes and delivering manure to animal stalls. Didn’t shoot until I was thirteen. The tightrope walker had his daughter visiting, and she was into archery. She let me play with her bow one day when we were left alone, and I kind of took to it. It became a thing, and they needed more acts when people left, so I started to perform regularly.”

Laura falls silent and finds herself thinking too much about the kid who used to catch frogs in his backyard and who grew up flinging quarters into tin cans on unforgiving summer days, who now shoots with six different arrows, most of which Laura can't remember the names of, who has coffee-stained teeth and a smile that’s more crooked than straight.

“I want to shoot,” she says finally and Clint looks over and grins. That night, they stay in Akron, and the next morning, Clint finds an open field.

She’s terrible at first, and Clint doesn’t hesitate to tell her so. She hits him hard enough to remind him that even though she didn’t grow up with a brother or in a circus, he _still_ doesn’t get to insult her for no reason. She misses every shot, and can barely find a trajectory, and she can’t seem to remember all the specifics in the order that they need to be remembered: breathe deep, elbow back, stance wide, breath fluid, arm out, shoulder up. But Clint teaches her again in Omaha, and again in Muncie, and again in Springfield. Laura gets better, and anyway, she swears she’ll never need to know how to shoot with a bow and arrow except when she’s showing off for Clint’s circus friends.

(Eventually, the farm will become cluttered, and there will be a bow stashed in the corner by the piano that Lila is learning to play because sometimes there’s Chopsticks and Chopin until ten at night, and sometimes superheroes bring trouble, and sometimes, Laura needs to remember she’s become extraordinary.)

“I can’t imagine seeing the world if it’s not with you,” Clint says when they stop for burgers and beer, his overgrown hair flopping into his face, because one night Clint will have too much to drink and ask her to marry him.

“Hopefully, you never have to,” Laura responds as she plays footsie with him under the sticky table, winking over a half-eaten stash of disco fries, because one night Laura will have too much to drink and say yes.

There’s a courthouse in Appleton, Wisconsin, and they both go and sign the papers. Laura wonders what she’ll tell her parents and Clint not so subtly reminds her that he has no parents to tell, and that will cause Laura to kiss him over and over again on the roof of their car while they watch the sky darken.

“Don’t feel sorry for me, we just got married,” he says grumpily. Laura fixes him with what she knows is her best _don’t fuck with me_ stare.

“You’re my husband now, so I get to feel sorry for you,” she decides, wrapping her arms around his shoulders. There aren’t any wedding rings; those will come later, cheap knock-offs that they’ll buy from a jeweler stand in New Mexico.

“We’ll get real ones eventually,” Clint says as he slides hers onto her finger, while Laura wonders if they even need real ones. She decides it’s not worth arguing over.

They settle in Iowa, because it's cheap and convenient and that's where their car finally breaks down and they think it's fate. One year into their marriage, when Laura is working in a small art gallery downtown and Clint is working as a bartender, when they’re living together in a small apartment that costs both of their monthly salaries, leaving little room to buy anything else, Clint comes home and surprises her with a diamond wedding ring.

“Pulled a few strings with some old circus friends,” he says after he gets down on one knee and presents it, ignoring Laura’s questions of _how_ and _why_ and _I’m going to kill you_. “Til death do us part, right?”

It would be fitting that Melinda May would arrive at their house the next day in a leather jacket and dark boots, taking off her sunglasses and wiping them on her shirt, opening the conversation with, “Clint Barton? We’ve heard about you. We’d like to offer you a job.”

 

***

 

 _Recruit, Level One. Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division,_ the papers say. There are pages upon pages of small typed words and highlighted sentences; Clint swears it’s protocol and Laura thinks that it’s all just a very bureaucratic way of saying, “welcome to our secret company, if anything happens, you’re fucked and you can’t sue us.”

“Look, it says here that I get my own trainer,” Clint says excitedly, sloshing hot coffee over the side of his mug and onto the table. Laura sighs and snatches the papers away.

“Are you going to send these back to your new job with sixteen thousand coffee stains? Because that’ll leave a great impression.”

Clint snorts. “What, like they’re going to _fire_ me?”

Laura hits him again, and Clint shuts up.

The day Clint leaves for SHIELD, Laura packs a bag of baked goods and fresh bread that she’s stayed up until three in the morning baking, and boxes of juice and fruit and an overstuffed sandwich. She puts it all in a big plastic bag and leaves it by his luggage and swears she’s fine, but she ends up snapping at him for no reason and then wanders aimlessly around the small apartment. Clint lets her do both things without making a fuss, until he finally can’t wait anymore, because he’s going to miss his bus.

She drives him to the Waterloo station feeling like she wants to cry, and Clint finds the only decent radio station in the area and starts belting out James Taylor with too much vigor. It makes Laura laugh, not because Clint is a terrible singer but because his passion is so over the top it’s almost hilarious.

(“But we _want_ to daddy to sing!” That will be the chorus late at night, because Laura’s too tired and Auntie Nat’s not there, and Lila will bop him on the head with her book and Cooper will grin at him with two missing teeth and Clint will sigh, but he’ll sing for his children because that’s what fathers do.)

There’s no one else around when they get to the bus, just a lazy attendant and driver taking tickets for New York who could care less that Clint and Laura are having a very public display of affection in front of his vehicle. Laura instantly notices that Clint, who has been optimistic and generally calm about the whole thing -- Clint, who had practically leapt to his feet the moment Melinda May had mentioned the word _potential_ in his presence -- suddenly seems a little hesitant. He clears his throat, staring up at the bus, and then looks back at Laura.

“Well, hey. Miss every shot you don’t take, right?”

Laura nods. “You better come home,” she says and it’s not a hope, it’s a threat. _Come home. You need to come home_.

“I will.”

Laura kisses him as if the world is ending, she kisses him until she sees stars, until she sees rooftops in the middle of nowhere and feels sawdust covered lips against a circus sky on top of a rusty trailer that’s seen better days.

He says _I love you_ with his face buried in her hair. She says it back and feels the world tip forward on its axis, and wonders how long it’ll take to right itself.

 

***

 

A month after Clint leaves, a man named Nick Fury comes to visit. He knocks once before Laura lets him in and then makes himself comfortable at the small table while Laura offers him tea or coffee or diet coke or whiskey. He chooses neither, and elects to drink from his own flask of unidentified liquor instead.

“I’ve come to ask you about your house,” he says, and Laura can’t help but feel slighted.

“You already took away my husband, now you want to take away my house, too?”

Fury looks genuinely surprised. “I don’t want to take away your house, no,” he says, offering out his flask. Laura shakes her head, because she’s three weeks pregnant and she’s going to call Clint when Fury finally leaves. “I want to offer you a house.”

Laura almost drops the cup she’s been holding, and after she’s returned it to the sink, she joins Fury at the table.

“I don’t understand.”

“Allow me to explain.” He leans back, giving her a one-eyed stare. “Your husband is doing some of the best work we’ve ever seen. I think it’s safe to say we’re going to be able to promote him quickly, if he continues on this path.”

“I could’ve told you that,” Laura scoffs, crossing her arms, because she’s never doubted Clint would excel at his new job. Fury smiles.

“I’m sure you’ve heard that with great power comes great responsibility.”

“I’ve read the stories,” Laura says, getting up and pouring herself a glass of iced tea. “But I’m more interested in real life. Does that mean my husband will be doing dangerous things?”

“In a sense.” Fury admits. “He’ll be away more, and he’ll be taking on some assignments that have higher stakes.”

“Okay.” Laura swallows down her apprehension and sits back down at the table, clutching her glass. “So how does a house fit into this?”

Fury hesitates. “SHIELD can make you enemies,” he says slowly. “Obviously, Agent Barton’s first priority is your well being, and I don’t think you feel very secure in a cheap apartment in the middle of nowhere.”

Laura immediately feels herself bristle at the words, because she’d probably be the first to admit their apartment was less than sophisticated. But it was comfortable and it was cheap and it was _home_ , down to the lights Clint had put in above the kitchen so she could read her books better and the faucet he had fixed in the bathroom and the fake bearskin rug he had thrown up on by accident when he came home sick with the flu.

“What I’m offering,” Fury continues when Laura doesn’t respond, “is a home off the grid. A farmhouse on the outskirts of Illinois, near where I know your parents still live, a place that SHIELD would buy and fix up. You could move in as soon as the end of the year, if you wanted. Nothing about your normal life would change, but things would be a little more secure.”

Laura wants to laugh at Fury’s words, because, yes, she goes to work and comes home and makes her bed and sings in the shower, but she’s also pretty sure that she gave up _normal_ the day she met Clint, the day she married him on a whim, the day she sent him off to SHIELD.

“I’ll think about it,” she says, showing him to the door.

Laura thinks about it. She goes on a run. She comes home and makes herself a smoothie in the blender that her mom got her for her birthday because “every nice girl needs to build a foundation in the kitchen.” She goes to work and talks about a few paintings in the art gallery to curious tourists, never pressuring them to buy, only engaging them if they want to learn about the aspects of fine art. She comes home and calls Clint, who is in the middle of eating dinner, and says, “we’re having a baby.” She hears Clint drop his plate of food on the ground.

“We’re having a baby?!”

(She walks into the bedroom where he’s curled up on his side, asleep with painkillers, and whispers, “we’re having a baby,”; she finds him outside repainting the deck, phone by his feet that he glances at every so often, waiting for any mention of Natasha’s whereabouts and says, “we’re having a baby.”)

“Did Fury talk to you about the house?” he asks after he’s calmed down, and Laura can hear him scraping food back onto his plate.

“Yes.” Laura waits until he seems to have settled himself before speaking again. “Did you ask him to come by?”

“No,” Clint says. “But I did tell him that if this goes any further than me taking on a few trips every once in awhile, I wasn’t going to do it unless I could be sure you were safe.”

Laura smiles to herself, because damn Clint, _damn_ Clint for always putting her first even when he’s not supposed to. She rubs her thumb against a mug she’s taken from home, the one she’s currently drinking tea out of, the one with the yellow and blue stars that reminds her of the girl who once dreamed of looking beyond rolling plains, but not knowing if she could make the leap.

“I think we should take the house,” she says after a long pause. Two months later, papers appear on her doorstep, along with a plane ticket. Laura gathers piles of Clint’s things and her things and throws away the parts of her life that she’s not sure she wants to keep, boxing up the rest in the hopes of figuring them out in another way. The paint brushes stay and the books stay, and Clint’s thick stack of paperbacks stay, and so do the receipts from gas stations and the coffee-stained napkins and matchboxes from roadside diners. She puts everything by the door and pours herself peach lemonade and sits in the chair that’s traveled with her from college to now, fingers holding tight to something tangible.

That’s the day Laura Barton’s life gets a little more extraordinary, though not by much.

 

***

 

Clint meets her at the airport and they drive to the location together, stopping at a diner on the way. Laura is pregnant, cranky, uncomfortable, and can’t stop eating potato chips.

“You’re going to grow a sour cream and onion kid,” Clint says as they approach the house. “Like that gum chewing girl from _Charlie and the Chocolate Factory_.”

“I’m glad you equate pregnancy cravings with the fact that you think our child will be bloated and purple,” Laura responds bitterly, and Clint shoots her a chagrined look.

“I was kidding. Sorry. Lame attempt at a joke.”

Laura sighs. “Yes, it was.” She follows him up the road after they park at the address they’ve been given, trying to ignore the fact that he looks different: his arms are bigger in all the wrong places and his shoulders seem too broad.

“What’s wrong?” Clint asks when he turns around halfway and finds Laura hanging back. Laura swallows.

“I can’t tell where the old you ends and the new you begins,” she admits quietly, feeling suddenly vulnerable. Clint frowns and walks forward, placing one hand on her stomach and the other on the back of her head.

“Wherever I go, I’ll be made of me,” he says, kissing her gently. “I promise.”

(“She said I’d be made of me. That you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference,” Clint insists when Laura lies in bed and puts her hand on his injury; Helen Cho had gone off and made a life of her own, had been unaware that the Avenger she patched up in Tony Stark’s tower was married to the farm-fresh girl she once tried to recruit over coffee. It’s not the first time Laura hasn’t recognized his body. She knows it won’t be the last. But he’s here, and he’s alive, and so she’s letting it go. Almost.

“I can tell the difference.”)

The house is big. It’s two stories with spacious square footage in each room, it has a fence and a barn and a tractor sitting in the grass. It needs work, but it’s livable for the time being, and even includes furniture.

They spend two nights there, cleaning up and getting settled and walking around the property, talking about how their son will have a lot of space to play and how Clint will have a lot of places to shoot. Laura brings home greasy Chinese food and they lie on the big strange bed together and Clint tells stories and jokes and Laura falls asleep to the sound of Clint’s harsh but comforting laugh.

On the second night, Laura comes downstairs after waking up alone and finds Clint standing in front of the kitchen wall, staring with his hands in his pockets.

“Clint?”

He doesn’t turn around, just continues staring.

“If we knock out that back wall, it could make a good work space for you.”

(“He talked about this, you know,” says Natasha, when she finds Laura staring sadly at the half-finished, messy space. She’s whispering, Clint has fallen asleep within earshot with Nathaniel stretched out along his chest. “In Sokovia. He didn’t forget.”)

On the third night, Clint picks up his bow and leaves to return to New York. He promises to be back before she gives birth. The movers show up the next day with Laura and Clint’s things, she calls Claire while she unpacks and the house still seems too big, so she calls her mom and then makes oatmeal raisin cookies while she waits for her grocery delivery to come, airing out the farm with every single window open, until she’s forced to close them because of the rain. Everything happens too fast.

And life goes on.

 

***

 

Clint goes to Istanbul for three weeks. It’s the longest stretch of time he’s stayed away from home since before the circus.

It’s supposed to be two weeks, or that’s what Clint has said, but he’s never lied about any trip before and Laura has no reason to believe he’d suddenly start. After two weeks and one day, she worries, but takes some of Clint’s expired Xanax and tries to calm down by watching _Casablanca_ over and over again. After two weeks and three days, she tries to call SHIELD, but can’t find a number no matter how many google searches she does, and the only one that Clint’s left her with is good for nothing more than a dial tone. After two weeks and five days, she’s more or less a visible mess and the house reflects that, dishes piling up in the sink and clothing sitting in the hamper and unopened mail sitting on the desk in the study.

He comes home after three weeks and one day, walking in the door at four in the morning, soft boots creaking against floors that desperately need work. She’s sprawled out on the couch because she can’t make herself sleep alone in the big bed, knocked out with more unorthodox medication, but wakes up when he reaches down to touch her cheek, dragging a finger down the curve of her face.

“Couldn’t call my ride,” he says, his voice cracking, and it takes her a moment to take him in. There’s dried blood on his face and his arm is in a sling and there are fresh abrasions all over his cheeks and down his neck, and Laura’s missed him so goddamn much she realizes she doesn’t know whether to scream or cry.

She does both, breaking down in his arms, one of which can’t even support her properly, with whispered mumblings of, _I hate this_ , and _never do this again_ , and _fuck you for putting me through hell_. Clint’s Clint and he holds her anyway, the way he's always promised he'll hold her, until she has no more tears.

 

***

 

Cooper Barton is born in the middle of a blizzard, and his name comes from Laura’s dad. Clint’s home, because he’s negotiated newly promoted time off for the last month of Laura’s pregnancy, and they drive to the hospital slowly while Laura breathes through contractions and Clint holds her hand. James Taylor plays on the radio and Clint sings too loudly, and Laura tries not to laugh, because the last thing she needs is to give birth in the middle of a dirt road.

Laura’s parents are there; they stay outside while Clint puts on a mask and a gown and when Laura pushes her son out of her body, Clint’s the first one to hold him in his arms.

“He looks just like you,” Clint says while beaming and Laura falls back into the pillow, exhausted.

“He looks like a baby,” she says, sweat dripping down her back, plastering her hospital gown to her skin.

“Aw, he's cute,” Clint says as tiny fingers reach out and grasp Clint’s pointer finger. “Look at his hands.”

“Come here,” Laura says as her parents burst into the room, practically clamoring for a look at Cooper, who starts to cry as Clint rocks him gently. Laura doesn’t have her phone handy, so her parents snap a picture of Clint and the baby and then one of all three of them. Laura sends it to Claire, and later, when she’s home, she prints it out and puts it up on the fridge.

Cooper cries a lot. Clint sings a lot, songs from the circus that Laura thinks he has an endless supply of. Laura doesn’t sleep except when she curls up on the couch at two in the afternoon while Clint is trying to feed Cooper, waking up only when Clint rouses her in order to force her into a real bed.

At some point, Clint gets bored and takes a selfie of all three of them while Laura’s passed out. She wants to hate him for it, but the picture itself is sort of cute, and Cooper’s actually smiling his first real smile, so she frames it and puts it on the fireplace mantle. Clint watches her put it up and makes fresh apple cider and Cooper dozes in his arms, tiny fingers curled around a large bicep, and it’s the first thing that makes the farm feel like home.

 

***

 

Clint goes missing in Jakarta, just after Cooper’s second birthday, and Laura only finds out because she happens to have an inside line to a younger agent who is working the communication lines, someone Laura has secretly become friendly with thanks to weekly email updates about trashy television shows. When the girl asks how she’s doing “with the disappearance of her husband,” Laura immediately changes the subject from _The Real Housewives_ and forces the girl to put her through to Coulson.

“What happened?”

Coulson pauses. “That’s classified. We were told --”

“This is my husband, he is not your property, and you don’t get to tell me something is classified,” Laura interrupts, raising her voice as loud as she dares so as not to disturb her son. “Now tell me what’s going on, or I will take this gun Clint has hidden in his drawer and fly down to New York right now.”

Coulson doesn’t answer for a long time, and Laura feels her blood boil. “I swear to _god_ \--”

“He was found an hour ago,” Coulson says shortly. “Alive, but compromised. We don’t know his condition yet.”

(The friend from SHIELD will move on and move up, but Natasha will take her place, and instead of bonding over trashy television shows they’ll bond over baked bread and bullet wounds. Natasha will call Laura one day as she’s making apple pie and say, “he was compromised,” and Laura will slice her finger open with a knife by accident because she’ll remember the last time someone said that to her.)

“Find out his condition,” Laura says shortly. “And find out by the time I get there. I’m leaving on the next plane.”

“Mrs. Barton, I really do think it’s best --”

“Mr. Coulson, with all due respect, I really do think it’s best if you shut up. I’m his wife and you’re not. If SHIELD wants to keep secrets from me, they’ll have to do better than just telling me I can’t see him when he’s hurt.”

There’s another long pause, and Laura can almost hear the defeated sigh that doesn’t come, because Phil Coulson is too prim and proper to show annoyance the same way that a child would.

“He’s being taken to SHIELD medical. We’ll text you the address.”

“Thank you.” Laura hangs up the phone, takes a few deep breaths, and then calmly walks to the bathroom to throw up. When she’s recovered, she calls her mother, who comes over and takes care of Cooper so she can leave for the airport.

SHIELD medical is nothing like Laura’s expected. because what she’s expected are the big scary aesthetics that comes with being a spy, white walls and secret agents walking around with guns. SHIELD medical looks like a normal hospital, the only difference being that it’s less bustling than Laura figures an emergency room might be.

They have him in a private room on the first floor. Laura overhears someone saying they only give private rooms to top agents with serious injuries, so Laura doesn’t exactly trust Coulson when he meets her and shakes her hand and says, “everything is fine.”

“I’d prefer if you didn’t lie to my face now that we’ve met in person,” Laura responds and Coulson nods slowly, setting his lips in a thin line.

“Agent Barton --”

“Clint,” Laura interrupts because _Agent Barton_ is not her husband. Agent Barton shoots arrows and wears a uniform and sometimes has to kill people for a living. Clint leaves coffee stains on the kitchen counter and sings lullabies to his son and laughs too loud at infomercials at six in the morning before actually buying things he has no use for.

“Clint,” Coulson amends, looking a little weary, “suffered internal injuries. Bruised spleen, cracked rib, concussion. Fractured part of his wrist as well.”

Laura listens, nods, tries to understand the meaning behind terms like “perforated lung,” and “excessive bleeding,” and “blunt force trauma.” She congratulates herself for not throwing up again and tries to remember what Clint has told her about the injuries he sustained in the circus, how he had recounted tales of broken bones and split lips like they were bruises. He had been cornered at his safe house and taken by the targets he was tracking, and although SHIELD had moved quickly, they had taken longer than they should have to find him.

“I assume you want to see him,” Coulson says when he speaks again, and he doesn’t bother to wait for an answer before waving Laura down the hall and pointing her towards Clint’s room. He’s lying in bed surrounded by tubes and medical equipment and blankets, there’s bruises all along his body and deep cuts along his arms sewn closed with messy stitches, and Laura has no idea what she’s supposed to do.

So she sits down in the hard chair next to him and ignores everyone except doctors who come in to change bandages or check on beeping monitors. Eventually, the artificial sounds became a soundtrack that lulls her, and a comfort: as long as they’re steady and loud it means that he’s alive, and it means that he’s breathing, and it means that he’s going to be okay.

She doesn’t leave his side except to shower in the small attached bathroom, or to grab food from the vending machine. Coulson and Cynthia, the girl who works in Communications, come by with sandwiches and juice and coffee every afternoon and evening, and Laura’s usually asleep when they come, so they leave the food on the table.

Clint wakes up four days later and tries to talk and realizes he can’t, so Laura talks for him. She says “hi” and “I’m here,” and “I love you,” but doesn’t say, “you goddamn idiot, what the hell did you do to yourself?” Clint listens, talks with his eyes, and the first thing he says when the tubes have been removed and he can finally speak again is, “I love you, too.”

He stays in the hospital until he’s recovered enough to not need 24 hour care anymore and then comes home on a five week leave to recuperate. Laura star gazes with Cooper on the porch, pointing out all the constellations, and writes in her spare time -- stories of spies and fantasy-drenched worlds that seem safer than her own. Sometimes she draws, sketching Clint when he sleeps, Cooper lying next to him: mouth open, thumb hanging out, snoring slightly.

Clint picks up his first home improvement project when he gets bored with sitting around and decides on a whim to re-floor part of the kitchen. He finishes the next night, and when he realizes he doesn’t have anything else to do, he asks Laura if he can possibly run out to Home Depot and look at paint samples.

It all goes downhill from there.

“We need to talk,” Laura says one day while she’s folding laundry. Cooper’s watching television and sufficiently distracted from adult conversation.

“What about?”

“You,” Laura says shortly. “I don’t like not knowing what you’re doing, where you’re going. I don’t like that this job involves the fact that I might not hear from you for three days and when I do, I could find out you’ve been captured and tortured or maybe you're lying in a ditch somewhere, dead from internal injuries.”

Clint exhales loudly. “I can’t give you that information. It’s part of the job.”

Laura feels her insides clench up, her hands squeezing the life out of the underwear she’s holding. “You’re my husband. That’s part of your job, too.”

Clint looks at Laura and then looks at Cooper, and opens his arms. Laura stands still for a very long time and then walks forward, wrapping her hands around his torso, his waist that’s gotten too broad and too chewed up with scars and cuts.

“Don’t leave him without a father,” Laura says. “Don't you _dare_ leave him.” Clint doesn’t say anything because Clint can’t promise that, and Laura knows it.

“I love you,” he says instead, because it’s the best he can do.

Clint eventually gets well enough to go back to work, and Laura has to get used to life as a quasi-single parent again. The floor stays undone, the washing machine breaks and doesn’t get fixed, the peeling paint on the porch gets withered and splintery in the rain and wind and cold.

And life goes on.

 

***

 

It’s not all grand plans and mission reports.

Clint brings Natasha home and doesn’t explain that this is a woman made of war and guns and knives and metal, but Laura sees it in the things Natasha doesn’t say when she stands in their living room. Clint brings Natasha home and doesn’t ask Laura first, just calls in the middle of the night, waking her up and almost scaring her half to death.

“There’s someone coming home with me.”

“What do you mean?” Laura asks when she’s recovered enough to talk, her heart still pounding from the harsh wake-up.

“A girl I met in Russia. We’re supposed to embed her but I’m bringing her to the farm. I think she could use some help.”

Laura sighs, kicking off the covers. “Did you not ask me first because you knew I wouldn’t talk you out of it, anyway?”

Clint hesitates. “Yeah, maybe.”

Two days later, Laura is reading _Make Way For Ducklings_ aloud to Cooper when Clint walks through the door with the girl from Russia. Cooper jumps from the couch with screams of “daddy!” and latches himself onto Clint’s leg, and Laura sizes up Natasha, who looks terrified and intrigued at the same time. At some point, Cooper tears himself away from his father and then stares up at the strange woman he doesn’t know.

“Say hi to Natasha,” says Clint gently, putting a hand on his son’s shoulder, and Cooper stares more before holding out a half-eaten candy necklace drenched in saliva.

“Tasha wan’ a present?”

(“ _Be kind_ ,” her mother has always said.) 

Laura smiles. “You’re welcome to stay,” she says, inviting Natasha into the kitchen for freshly made scones and peach iced tea.

(“Be kind,” says Auntie Nat years later, when Cooper is upset about a bully at school, and doesn’t want to be his partner on a science project, and Cooper will grumble and pout but he’ll listen.)

Natasha Romanoff wouldn’t have been Laura’s first or last choice for a friend. But then all of a sudden, Natasha is wearing Laura’s clothes and sleeping in the guest bedroom and showing Laura how to make pierogis in the sun-lit kitchen when it’s too early in the morning and they both can’t sleep. All of a sudden, Clint is coming home and telling stories about the first time Natasha tried McDonalds, how she fixed his bow when no one else could, how she lent him her jacket when they were stranded and freezing on a mission.

“My real name is Natalia,” she tells Laura one day while Laura is wiping drool and applesauce off her son’s face with a wet towel. She’s perched on the corner of the counter, even though Laura has kindly asked her countless times to not do that because her child will start to think it’s acceptable behavior.

“That’s a nice name,” says Laura, because she’s still learning how to read Natasha the way Clint apparently can. She finishes cleaning up Cooper, who toddles away, slightly unbalanced.

Natasha is hesitant to be alone with Cooper at first, but one day Laura’s in the middle of cooking and Natasha is sitting on the worn couch helping fold laundry while Clint takes a shower. Cooper reaches over to pat her head and says, “Tasha!” in a loud voice while giggling, and after that, all of Natasha’s remaining edges fall off.

And life goes on.

 

***

 

The second time Nick Fury visits the house, Laura’s grilling on the front porch for Cooper, in anticipation of Clint’s arrival later in the week.

“You couldn’t wait until my husband came home?”

Fury smiles grimly as he walks up the steps. “I didn’t need to. I came by to drop these off.” He places a stack of papers on one of the porch chairs as Laura closes the grill cover and wipes grease-stained hands on her jeans.

“What are these?”

“The first of your husband’s papers. Reports on all his upcoming missions and assignments, the rest will follow as we get them. Cynthia has moved on from Communications, but Coulson will be your point of contact.”

Laura stares down at the papers, picking them up with two hands.

“Why?”

Fury sighs. “Mrs. Barton. This life, the one that your husband has chosen, doesn’t come with hand holding. It doesn’t come with the inside knowledge of getting to know if someone is or isn’t okay when they go into the field. There are few agents who have wives who make as big of a commotion as you do when something goes wrong, because most of them accept that fact.”

“Is that a problem?” Laura interrupts icily.

“A little, considering most wives also don’t bribe my staff with promises of gossip about the latest television shows behind my back. But that’s in the past, now. I’d rather not have to deal with you calling every single SHIELD agent in the future when something goes south, and Clint has requested that we find a way to keep you informed of his assignments, or he’ll quit altogether. So I’m personally giving you authorization to know about his work.” He pauses, eyeing her stomach. “Congratulations, by the way. On the pregnancy.”

(Laura’s told Clint, who she assumes has told Natasha, who she assumes has told Coulson, who she assumes has maybe told Fury.)

“Thanks,” she says, putting her hands around a barely-visible lump as something (a lamp, maybe) crashes to the floor inside the house. “Maybe this one will follow rules a little better.”

“I doubt that,” Fury says dryly. “It’s a Barton. It’ll be a troublemaker, no matter what.”

“I like troublemakers,” Laura responds before inviting Fury inside for hot dogs and potato salad, the only adequate way she feels like she can say thank you for what he’s giving her.

“Obviously, Mrs. Barton, you do.”

 

***

 

Lila’s birth is similar to Cooper’s, with the exception of the fact that there are extra people in the room and Clint runs in half an hour before the delivery, having just gotten off the plane from Serbia.

“I could kill you,” Laura says through her contractions, squeezing Natasha’s hand. Natasha stares up at Clint, who’s dripping with sweat and blood.

“Really, Barton?”

“ _You_ try fighting off a hoard of angry mobsters and see how much time you have to shower,” Clint says, sitting on the other side of the bed and taking Laura’s hand. Lila Barton screams louder than Cooper did but she’s less red and less squishy, and Laura immediately offers her to Natasha.

“Come on, Nat. You’re family, now.”

(“Is Tasha my mom?” Cooper asks one day, wandering into Laura’s bedroom. Clint and Laura exchange glances.

“She’s kind of your mom,” Clint says finally. “She cares about you like your mom and dad do.”

“Oh. Okay.” Cooper’s apparently satisfied with this answer, because Natasha helps him with school projects and teaches him how to throw punches in her spare time, unbeknownst to Clint and Laura.)

“Children and I don’t really get along,” Natasha says slowly, looking a little apprehensive.

(“What’s the hospital fire?” Laura will ask while going through a batch of freshly delivered paperwork, and Clint will turn white and Natasha will sit rigidly and Laura will understand then the reaction of someone who has killed children.)

“You’re going to get along with this one,” Laura decides, because she’s not taking no for an answer. Natasha smiles a little bit but still shakes her head.

It takes Natasha weeks until she wants to pick up Lila, but then, one day, Laura returns from running errands to find Clint staring at the couch, where Natasha is holding the baby and singing songs in Russian. Eventually, she shifts from singing songs to brushing hair to feeding to tying shoes. Lila says her first word and Natasha’s the one who grabs for the camera, and Clint laughs so hard he falls off the couch, and Laura watches it all from a distance: this former war-bred assassin bonding with her child. She feels herself growing a little older, a little wiser, and a little more extraordinary.

And life goes on.

 

***

 

The farm grows. The tractor gets fixed and Laura starts a garden and lets her children plant tomato seeds. Clint brings home exotic food and souvenirs from his travels, trinkets that start to line the shelves in Cooper and Lila’s room before spilling over into the master bedroom and living room. Natasha brings home fantasy-like stories for Cooper and Lila that are mostly true, except for the parts about killing that she leaves out and replaces with words like, “magical disappearing fairy dust.” The parts of the house that become lived in don’t get fixed, while the parts that could be improved do. Laura learns about molding and sanding and painting, and Cooper puts on old too-big overalls and splatters paint across his face and the wall as he helps Clint change a blue chair into a tan one.

Lila has no interest in home improvement, it turns out, but she’ll lie on her stomach next to her dad and look at picture books for hours until Laura picks her up off the floor.

The farm grows, and so do the people inside of it. Laura takes a shower and finds two grey hairs that she plucks out, Clint moves more slowly after being laid up by small injuries, Natasha’s curls grow to a length where Lila can help braid them into messy twists. When Clint’s away, Laura learns how to keep herself busy reading reports and writing stories. Her two-year-old learns words and phrases, and Cooper throws spoons and plastic plates and books and whatever he can get his hands on at the wall, because that’s apparently a stage he’s going through. Laura thinks about giving him some nerf arrows, though his aim isn’t anywhere near as good as his dad’s, and Natasha eventually takes him aside, gives him a bag of felt balls she’s picked up at the store, and teaches him how to throw correctly.

That summer, Cooper asks to try out for baseball. Three summers later, he’s the star of Little League and Natasha watches from the stands with Clint’s proud-father whooping assaulting her eardrum while Lila puts sticky hands on Natasha’s neck and drops ketchup and mustard over Natasha’s only available pair of pants.

Laura gets texts from Jane, who to no one’s surprise has excelled her way through Culver and has caught the eye of her professor, Erik Selvig. According to Jane, he plans to take her under her wing and mentor her further in astrophysics. Jane sends her charts of star gazing and pictures of the Virginia sky, and Laura sends back pictures of the farm, of Cooper and Lila, and of her latest drawings.

_You wouldn’t believe the house I have. I have my own barn now, though the roof is a little smaller than what we’re used to. You’ll have to come over for star gazing sometime, if you ever get a break._

She checks in on Claire, who has finished her residency and is starting work as a nurse at Metro-General Hospital.

“I swear, things around here are crazy,” Claire says. “Did you know there are rumors of superheroes running around?”

Laura doesn’t tell her she married one, because Claire still thinks Clint’s a carnie, and that’s okay.

“Maybe that’s the next adventure in your love life,” Laura suggests while she makes herself iced coffee, watching sugar disappear into the liquid. “A superhero.”

“Yeah, right.” Claire snorts. “Like _that’ll_ ever happen.”

Laura doesn’t blink too much when Clint goes off to New Mexico, because it’s the job, and now that she knows most of what Clint is doing (thanks to Natasha), it’s a little easier to breathe at night and in the dark. So she doesn’t really find herself concerned when she misses a call from Natasha and then another one from Fury while she’s wrangling her children into the car and later, into the house, Cooper running ragged from summer camp and on a sugar high Laura absolutely did not approve of, with Lila screaming about how she wants Natasha’s pierogis for dinner.

(The third time Nick Fury visits the house, looking like the world has ended, she doesn’t offer him hot dogs or whiskey, because she knows something’s very horribly wrong.)

 

***

 

“He’s been compromised,” says Natasha, and Laura slices her finger instead of an apple.

“What do you mean, compromised?” She keeps her voice cheery as blood spurts out of her wound, because Cooper is trying to help Lila read at the table, and because the sun is streaming through the window like it’s a brand new day that refuses to be tarnished. She turns around so her children can’t see her face.

“I don’t know,” Natasha admits. “But I’m going to find out.”

“Let me know when you do,” Laura says before she hangs up. She doesn’t expect to hear anything more, but she watches the battle on television and breathes a sigh of relief when she sees Clint shooting from the roof, jumping off of it with the same deftness and confidence that she remembers from the circus. Half of her is terrified and the other half is comforted, because she recognizes enough of his body movements to know that he’s shooting and fighting of his own accord. It’s not until Natasha calls after the battle is over that she realizes the truth.

“He won’t come home,” Natasha says after she explains about Loki, about the brainwashing. “He doesn’t trust himself around the kids.”

“Then I’ll come to New York,” Laura decides, already halfway to the closet in preparation of dragging out her suitcase. Natasha sighs over the phone.

“It’s not going to be that easy,” she responds. “He needs time. He might need to be away for awhile.”

“Awhile.” Laura feels herself getting angry. “So what do I tell my children? That their father is abandoning them?”

“I’ll absolutely make sure he doesn’t abandon them,” Natasha promises, and then she hangs up.

Laura sits in silence for awhile and then calls Claire, and asks what she knows about brainwashing. Claire’s specialty is surgery, but when she gets off the phone, she sends Laura some links to a few documents she’s remembered reading from her days of medical school research. Fury’s papers follow a few days later, along with a flash drive that Laura waits to watch until she can open a bottle of whiskey and her children have long gone to bed.

She cries at the kitchen table watching Clint shoot friends and colleagues, his movements calculated and quick and not at all his own.

She cries because she sees the man who has too much heart, too much empathy and too much love, and because knows exactly why Loki wanted to take him in the first place.

She cries when Clint walks through the door two weeks later, looking haggard and older than he did when he left, because Cooper screams loudly and doesn’t let go of him and Lila yells “daddy!” over and over again.

He goes to a psychologist twice a week because everyone, including Natasha but especially Laura, has agreed that he shouldn’t go talk to anyone related to SHIELD for obvious reasons. A few days after Clint returns to the farm, Natasha arrives with a suitcase and sets up shop in the guest bedroom. She cooks with Laura and talks with Clint and plays baseball with Cooper. Laura and Clint have long conversations in private while Natasha’s hands become sore with popsicle stick houses and her brain becomes full with math homework. Lila wakes up in the middle of the night with nightmares about her dad being taken by nameless aliens and faces covered with masks. Natasha and Laura sit up with her and soothe her back to sleep, Natasha whispering in her ear while Laura holds her hand and tries to remember songs Clint would sing from the circus.

Sometimes, Laura finds Clint staring at his bow and arrows, his hands clenched by his side. She doesn’t ask, because she doesn’t need to know that he’s thinking of where he’s put every single one of those arrows a few weeks ago.

“Do you want to shoot?” Laura asks, knowing the question is falling on deaf ears. She thinks of spilled coffee and the open fields of Akron and a blue sky and an afternoon that feels like so long ago.

“Not really,” Clint answers, shoving his hands in his pockets and Laura’s not surprised because everything lately has been “not really,” from home improvements to food to shooting his own weapon.

“You can’t just _stop_ ,” she says finally, irritably, after he’s asked her to make tea and she’s boiled water. She chooses one of the cups that Lila has painted for a Father’s Day gift, the words _daddy, houses, arrows, dogs_ and then Clint’s name painted on the side with a messy red heart. Clint looks at it and his hand shakes; Laura steadies it and helps him drink.

Laura takes walks with Natasha and her children and at night when she can’t sleep because Clint can’t sleep she draws idly, and writes about memories of the open road, about diners and sleeping babies with food on their face, and the boy from the circus with floppy hair and sawdust-tainted lips. Laura draws what she remembers, and sometimes Clint catches her and stares, until he moves closer and asks to watch, and sometimes Laura wonders if he’s watching because he's trying to remember, too.

In the middle of the night, Laura wakes up to a loud crash, one that sends her heart shooting out of her chest. She quickly checks on her children, who miraculously seem to be unaffected by the sound, and then slips on her robe and walks down the stairs. There’s light streaming from the kitchen and Clint’s banging the wall in with a hammer and Laura stops halfway into the room and stares with her mouth open.

She wants to scream. She wants to throw something at him for being so goddamn _stupid_ and making noise at three in the morning like he’s the only one around, but when he turns and she sees his face, the words die in her throat.

“Sorry.” He looks visibly apologetic, and gestures to the thick hole. “It’s just...you said I couldn’t stop.”

The nightmares, both his and Lila’s, eventually fade. The air around the house becomes easier to breathe. Natasha passes her seventh year of being brought into SHIELD and Clint celebrates by giving her a sterling silver arrow necklace that his kids have helped pick out. Cooper teaches Lila how to read and Natasha teaches Lila how to make pierogis. Clint tears the house apart little by little, room by room, floorboard by floorboard. Fury eventually lets him return to work, small missions that have him away for only 24 hours at the most, designed to allow him a chance to acclimate back into the field without feeling too much pressure. After a month or so of traveling around Peru and Germany and Baghdad, Clint walks in the door and drops his bag on the hardwood he’s just refurbished a week ago.

“I think I want to take break,” he says, walking into the kitchen where Laura’s chopping tomatoes for a salad. She hums under her breath.

“What about Natasha?”

(Natasha is more spy than soldier and has been placed on secret missions at the behest of Fury, who wants her to work with Captain America. She’d asked Clint to join. Clint had declined. It’s been over a year since New York, but Laura is nice enough not to call that out as an excuse, because she’d choose having him home in a heartbeat if there was ever an option.)

“She’ll be okay.”

“What about _you_?”

Clint steps further into the kitchen, picking up a knife and joining her at the sink, chopping lettuce.

“I’ll be okay, too.”

For the first time in years, Laura doesn’t get a stack of classified papers sent to her attention every week. Instead, she goes with Clint to school assembly meetings and elementary school plays, and Lila brings home papers with marks that read “excellent!” along with hand-written stories about superheroes and dragons. Cooper learns to hate brussel sprouts and spicy food which means Laura has to change half of the meals she makes. They take a weekend trip to a bed and breakfast where Cooper picks pumpkins from a large field and Lila runs haphazardly around the wide grass while Clint chases after her, complaining about his joints and being too old to put up with this kind of stuff. Natasha calls to check in, and Laura eventually recognizes half the conversations as a thinly veiled attempt to ask about homemade food, because she’s probably coming to visit. Clint’s bow remains hidden in the attic, and he takes it out every so often when the children are in bed, and Laura watches him shoot from the window of their bedroom while reading _Lord of the Rings_ for the tenth time.

And life goes on.

 

***

 

The first mission that Clint takes with SHIELD when he goes back full time is a recon assignment in Madripoor. Two weeks after he leaves, SHIELD falls. It’s the first time since Clint got hurt so many years ago that Laura feels like she’s going to lose her shit.

Natasha calls her immediately. Clint call her two hours later, from a number Laura doesn’t recognize. He’s safe, but he can’t come home or make contact, and he has to lie low until everything straightens itself out. Laura understands, says she loves him, puts the kids on to say hello and pretends Clint is anywhere but in a dank alley with ripped clothes and possible internal bleeding.

“Maybe we should get a dog,” Clint says warily before he hangs up the phone, and Laura tries to imagine what her life would be like with the addition of wrangling a creature along with two over-excited kids. She then thinks about having someone else that could sleep in the bed with her at times like this and considers it might not be the worst idea, and bookmarks a few pet adoption agencies on her computer, because it’s not the right time now but maybe it will be, eventually.

She worries about the people that aren’t Natasha or Clint, the ones that Clint has told her about when they lie in bed and when he traces shapes along her pregnant belly: Tony Stark the enigmatic billionaire who has too much bravado, Steve Rogers who maybe isn’t small anymore but still doesn’t let people push him around, Thor the literal God who had acclimated to Earth and humans the same infant-like way Cooper once threw nerf arrows and empty paint cans at the wall, Bruce Banner the mild-mannered scientist who was learning to control his rage the same infant-like way Lila once screamed and screamed and screamed because she couldn’t figure out how to articulate what she wanted.

She worries about the people that aren’t Natasha or Clint, the ones she’s known her whole life, even if they haven’t been as present. Jane’s brain and her research have taken her somewhere across the world, Tromso or an equally random middle-of-nowhere place where Laura figures there’s nothing but labs and stars. Nick Fury has gone underground but promises he’ll still show up for pasta night on occasion. (The first night he does, Laura serves him white wine and remarks that he looks pretty good for a dead man, and Clint snorts from where he’s taking a turkey out of the oven, and Cooper and Lila stare at the man in ragged clothes who is talking to them rather animatedly about their interests as if he’s known them all their lives.) Claire assures her that if she needs to bolt anywhere, if she needs safety or to get out of the farm, she can always come to her apartment in New York.

“Your place isn’t big enough,” Laura says, chewing on a thick lock of hair while Lila chews on a carrot stick.

“I’ll make it big enough,” Claire promises. “I’ve been watching the news,” and Laura imagines her staring at the oversized hospital monitors during break time, sipping vending machine coffee. “Is that one yours?”

Laura’s finally told her about Clint being a little more than a carnie.

“That’s his partner,” Laura says. “The one fighting with Captain America.” She’s not sure who the guy with the wings is, but Clint will tell her when he gets home, and Natasha will fill in the blanks when she arrives a few days later, harboring a half-infected bullet wound and a head full of uncertainties.

“Goddamn,” Claire says with wonder, before she gets an emergency admission on her beeper.

It takes Laura a long time to feel like the farm is safe again. She drinks too much coffee and doesn’t sleep because every creaky step makes her wonder if it’s not her husband or his partner coming up the stairs, and not Cooper sneaking out of his bedroom to grab candy from the pantry, which she knows he’ll take back and share with his sister under the covers.

“So are you still an Avenger?” Laura asks one day while she nurses a cup of tea. Clint is sitting with Lila on his knee and Natasha is trying to teach Cooper the beginnings of rudimentary Russian.

“I think so,” Clint muses, while Lila tugs at Clint’s ear. “Ow -- Lila -- come on, daddy’s not a toy.” Lila laughs and giggles and Natasha laughs too, and Clint frowns at her. A few weeks later, when things are a little calmer, Clint looks up from stirring a pot of soup and says, “I think I could do with another project.”

“You’ve already got three in progress,” Laura responds from where she’s sorting mail at the table, thinking of the barn and the sunroom and the stairs. Clint clears his throat quietly.

“I mean, _another_ project.”

Laura looks up and meets his eyes, which are crinkling around the edges. She thinks that he’s got more lines than he did last week, and wonders if her grey hairs have multiplied by default. (She’s been dying it since she found the first ones, so she hasn’t been paying attention.)

“Oh.” Laura sits back and grins a little, because she gets it suddenly. “ _That_ kind of project.”

Clint gets a call that Tony and Steve and Thor and Bruce are going to try to find the rogue Hydra weapon that’s caused so many problems. It’s not really a notification as much as it’s an order -- join up, come back, do what you signed up to do for your job -- and so Clint digs his uniform out of the closet and sorts his arrows and spends extra time reading along with Cooper and Lila while Laura watches the stars.

“Are you sure?” Laura asks, when she sees Clint’s subtle but absolutely noticeable reaction to the photo of the scepter. (It’s been over two years since New York, but Laura is nice enough not to call that out as an excuse.)

“Yes,” Clint says with such firmness that Laura can’t doubt him, and so she kisses him and puts a bag of baked goods in his hand before she sends him off again.

“That’s for Natasha,” she says when she sees him eyeing the cookies sticking out of the bag. “Don’t let Tony eat them. She’ll be pissed.”

“You think I have to worry about _Natasha_ letting anyone else eat your homemade cookies?” Clint raises an eyebrow. “He’d be dead before he got the first one in his mouth.”

Laura smiles and watches as he smothers Cooper and Lila with kisses before he leans over to kiss her growing stomach, thumbing the sides of her enlarged skin.

“You’ll be huge by the time I get back,” he says. Laura feels her throat tighten.

“Just make sure you get back,” she says quietly, because Hydra missions aren’t mobsters in Budapest or aliens in New York, but they’re still dangerous and they’re still taking him away from home. Clint nods.

“I don’t leave my projects unfinished,” he says, kissing her again. Laura opens the door, letting sunlight pour into the already-bright house. Cooper and Lila go back to their chores, and Laura puts two hands on her stomach and watches him walk away until she can’t see him anymore.

And life goes on.

 

***

 

Lila tears through books faster than Laura can buy them, and she eventually resorts to getting a library card just for that purpose. Cooper finds that he’s obsessed with American History and, unlike his mother, hates science. Laura bakes banana bread and becomes far too interested in home decorating shows.

Sokovia falls from the sky and Clint brings superheroes home by accident, because there’s nowhere else for them to go, because Clint’s the only one with a stable life that means something outside of avenging. Laura doesn’t eat for two days when Clint goes back out into battle, and in that time, Claire calls and tells her that she met a guy who is blind and also sometimes saves the world.

“Guess I should’ve listened to you,” she says when Laura asks how they met, and Claire responds she’d found him in a dumpster and brought him home to patch him up. Laura tries to smile but it hurts in more ways than one, and so she busies herself with Cooper’s homework and Lila’s books.

Clint comes home alone. He puts his hands on Laura’s stomach and says, “I told you, I wasn’t done with my project yet,” and Laura cries, because she realizes this is the first time in her life that she hasn’t been sure if he would make it. He lies in bed and traces a hand over her pregnant belly like he’s used to doing and tells her new stories about Wanda Maximoff, the girl who reads minds and who needed someone to give her a home and Pietro Maximoff, the boy who gave up his life so Clint could live his own. He sleeps better in his own bed than Laura suspects he did on the road, but he has different nightmares now, and this time it isn’t aliens but a kid with a heart as big as Clint’s, who jumped in front of a bullet without even knowing why. Laura reminds him of Cooper and Lila and Nathaniel, and says, “ _I know why_ ,” and then suggests that maybe their unborn child needs a middle name after all.

Laura buys Cooper a kids sized bow and arrow for his birthday, and Clint finally agrees to teach him, and he’s more of a natural than Laura was which means Clint doesn’t shut up about that. Laura watches from the porch, helping Lila draw pictures, and thinks of diners and roadtrips and a big open sky. She goes into labor in the middle of the night and Natasha meets them at the hospital and Laura’s mother looks at her mud-stained clothes and sighs and mutters, “ _superheroes_ ,” under her breath and then asks, “will one of you _ever_ be able to show up looking normal?”

Laura brings Nathaniel Pietro home and the baby sleeps and Laura doesn’t, and Laura thinks she should be used to this by now since it’s her third kid but it still doesn’t stop her from mainlining coffee. One day, she opens the door to find that Clint’s returned from his errands with a bag of diapers, bottles, food, and a yellow mutt that’s panting and thin.

“It followed me home,” he explains, gesturing to the dog and Laura raises an eyebrow, thinking of Natasha and of Clint’s question of whether or not he could bring Wanda to the farm for a few days at some point soon.

“A lot of things seem to follow you home.”

“I know,” he admits, scuffing his foot against the ground, and Nathaniel coos and gurgles in Laura’s baby sling. “We can keep him, right?”

“Did you not ask me first because you knew I wouldn’t talk you out of it, anyway?”

Clint smiles. “Yeah, maybe.”

Laura sighs and lets the dog into the house, where it promptly barks and leaves mud-stained paw prints all over the newly cleaned floor. Cooper and Lila scream happily like it’s Christmas morning and Laura knows, in that moment, that she’s doomed.

Clint names the dog Lucky, and spends the weekend building a dog run and a fence in the backyard while Laura makes lemonade and occasionally watches from the window while making dinner. Lucky chews on all of Cooper’s toys and gives Lila slobbery kisses when he comes in from his walks, and he curls up next to Nathaniel when Laura has placed the baby in his bouncer so that she can actually move around and do things around the house.

“Clint got a dog?” Natasha asks when she comes to visit, dropping an armful of presents in exchange for a banana smoothie and homemade scones.

“He didn’t, if you know what I mean,” Laura responds. “Are you surprised?”

Natasha shrugs. “No, not really.”

The circus comes back around Clint’s birthday, and Laura gathers Nate and the kids and drives them into town, where Clint gets a little misty-eyed looking at the trailers and the big top tent. Laura holds his hand, squeezes it a lot to remind him that she’s here, and Cooper eats a lot of cotton candy and Lila asks excitedly about animals while an unimpressed Nate sleeps through it all.

“Daddy used to do that,” says Clint as they watch an acrobat scale the side of the tent, smoothing down a scraggly mass of what Laura has affectionately dubbed her “Jewish fro.” Lila’s eyes grow wide and round.

“Daddy used to be in the _circus_?”

Later, bedtime will be pictures and stories instead of books, and Laura will take out the scrapbook of letters and postcards that she kept from Clint in college, and her children will peer through each page with rabid interest. Laura will stare at the memories that seem so long ago and not long ago at all, and then look at her husband, who has a large bruise on his face from where he’s walked into a door by accident, and she'll find her emotions spilling over at this messy, loveable family she’s created.

Loki had said Clint had heart, Melinda May had said Clint had potential. Nick Fury had said Clint had talent, the circus trainer had said Clint had skill. Natasha had seen a man willing to put down his weapon at the feet of a killer and walk away based on a feeling, Wanda had seen a man willing to look past her mistakes and give her a second chance. Pietro had seen a man willing to do anything to protect another child, so that no one would ever have to know what it felt like to lose one.

Laura had seen a boy who shot arrows into the sky, who offered to show her the world when she didn’t quite have the courage to look outside of the one she created for herself.

(“I’m not sure I know what I want,” Laura had admitted to Clint on their first real date, when grades and science projects and pristine folders from Culver University sitting next to half-empty mugs of tea were still a thing. Clint had smiled and taken her hand.

“Here’s something I learned from being on the road: Not a lot of people do.”)

Clint retires but not really; he goes out to help Natasha but it takes him a little longer to recover when he gets back, because he's not twenty-five anymore and he knows it. Laura stops dying her hair as frequently and lets more grey settle in, because she's not twenty-three anymore and she knows it. (Natasha has teased her that it looks distinguished, and that it represents the fact she has  _lived_.) Lucky grows heavier and rounder and Cooper feeds him scraps of food under the table, and Lila writes book reports that are pages longer than what her teachers expect, and Nathaniel gurgles his first smile and takes his first steps and grows into his plump cheeks. Natasha’s hair remains red, but in some lights it’s also a combination of blonde and brown, a mess of colors that, thanks to multiple dye jobs over the years, have made her curls look softer and less harsh, sanded down in the same way Laura's watched Natasha's soul soften.

There are superheroes that tromp into her house and papers that show up on her doorstep, and sometimes coded messages that don’t make sense. But then there is the farmhouse with the creaking back steps and the curtains decorated with photos of birds, slightly tattered, and the overflowing fridge filled with tin-foiled leftovers and chocolate pudding. There is Clint, the archer from the circus who once invited her onto a trailer roof to watch the stars, who once had bruises and cuts from his abusive circus handler and now has bruises and cuts from saving the world or from helping his children climb trees. There is Clint who still burns his hands by accident when he takes a mug out of the microwave, who drops his cereal on the floor and leaves coffee stains on the table and snores far too loudly, who kicks his wife in bed in the middle of the night and swings his children around on his shoulders, even though he complains afterwards that it hurts too much.

It’s somehow turned into an extraordinary life, but the most important people in it are far from extraordinary, and Laura doesn’t need them to be.

**Author's Note:**

> For more fic/etc, find me on [tumblr](http://isjustprogress.tumblr.com).


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